Home › Egg › Celery Sandwich No. 2
Celery Sandwich No. 2
Butter bread on the loaf, first having creamed the butter. Cut away the crusts and starting at one corner of the slice, roll it over two crisp short celery sticks. Tie with baby ribbon.
A rolled tea sandwich that depends entirely on the bread staying pliable. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: fresh bread, thinly cutA slice that cracks when rolled cannot be rescued. Use a soft, fine-grained sandwich loaf a day old at most, cut about 1/4 inch thick, and flatten each slice lightly with a rolling pin before buttering.
- Buttering on the loafThe old practice of spreading the cut face of the loaf and only then slicing it off gives an even, thin coat without tearing. It works best with a long serrated knife and a firm-sided loaf.
- Creamed butterButter beaten until soft and light, not melted. Leave it at room temperature an hour, then work it smooth with a spoon or paddle; melted butter soaks into the crumb and the roll goes limp.
- Baby ribbonA very narrow ribbon, on the order of 1/8 inch wide, of the sort sold by the yard for trimming. The nearest modern equivalent is 3mm satin ribbon; the ribbon is decorative and would be removed before eating.
- Celery sticks"Short" presumably means cut to about the width of the bread slice, so the ends sit flush or protrude only slightly. Crisp the ribs in ice water and dry them thoroughly, or the moisture will slacken the roll.
- Holding themSet the rolls seam-side down, close together in a shallow dish, cover with a barely damp cloth and refrigerate no more than a few hours. They dry out faster than a flat sandwich because of the exposed spiral edge.
- YieldOne slice makes one roll; the number from a loaf and the number to a serving will depend on the loaf and the occasion.
Rolled and ribbon-tied sandwiches belong to the era of the afternoon tea table and the bridge luncheon, when a sandwich was judged as much on its silhouette as its filling; such books also give pinwheels, rolled asparagus tips and bread cut with fancy cutters. Celery was a fashionable table vegetable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trench-grown and blanched, and often served upright in a dedicated celery glass, so a crisp rib inside a buttered roll read as an elegant thing rather than a scrap of salad. The instruction to butter the loaf before slicing recurs in period sandwich instructions.